I have a ten year old laptop ACER Travelmate 6594G-6492 i7 2.8ghz. After using a usb install stick, wiping and using entire disk, on reboot it says "this is not a bootable disk" - I 'live booted' a gparted thumb and it says that mageia wiped the hd's, installed a lot of software in / and /home, and that the 270 mb dos partition mounted on /boot/EFI is bootable.

I have tried multiple methods including switching between ACHI and IDE. That is, I have done several full installs including checking to make sure the drive was bootable with gparted, and I have searched this forum unsuccessfully for hints.

Why is the boot process not finding my partitions?

Last edited by canadaist on Aug 11th, '18, 02:01, edited 1 time in total.

canadaist wrote:I have a ten year old laptop ACER Travelmate 6594G-6492 i7 2.8ghz.[...]and that the 270 mb dos partition mounted on /boot/EFI is bootable. [...]Why is the boot process not finding my partitions?

Because it seems it has booted the installer in what seems like UEFI mode and hence did an UEFI install, but I don't believe that your laptop actually supports UEFI boot at all.

if the install is in UEFI mode, ie, you let the installer take care of partitioning and it created /boot/EFI, it would imply the unit is UEFI capable.that being said, there are some uefi bios that are not LInux friendly.

Dual booting?

silly question time. you did disable "Secure Boot", and "TPM" (trusted platform module) if these options are in the bios.you may need to create security password to do these, then when done, change the password back to empty.

Unless there is a pressing reason to use UEFI, have you tried to switch to "Legacy" or "CSM" (compatibility support mode) boot mode?You would need to re-run the installer, change the /boot/EFI to type "boot bios" (does not need a mount point).If using the Classical installer, you also do not need to format your / or /home etc partitions.

silly question time. you did disable "Secure Boot", and "TPM" (trusted platform module) if these options are in the bios.you may need to create security password to do these, then when done, change the password back to empty.

All the security lines end in "clear" or "create"

Unless there is a pressing reason to use UEFI, have you tried to switch to "Legacy" or "CSM" (compatibility support mode) boot mode?

Ken-Bergen wrote:Did you report this as a bug or is a kludge fix good enough?

From what I've seen this is a well know problem with UEFI, very well known, I may know less than anyone. The cure for "motherboards of a certain age" -- is to install 4 then 5 then 6. Mageia coders worked for weeks to overcome this, as I understand the blog and delays of 6's release.

I dont know about upcoming Mageia 7.

Also why didn't you try Installation media instead of Live media?

I left out discussing other install methods I tried, because Mageia 6 Live media worked best, standard Mageia DVD media (on USB) didn't proceed through install as well as the Live media. I used both: Boot then Install, and also with Install directly. Outcomes for both were the same. I tried to use gparted for example to take the boot tag off and then add it back in, hoping that was the problem. But it did not work.

I had no trouble with Mageia 4.1 install, and 5 went swimmingly fast, one CLI command. On the first boot of 5 Mageia offered to begin the transition to 6, which went quickly without problems. The laptop did the work, I only spent minutes.

canadaist wrote:From what I've seen this is a well know problem with UEFI, very well known, I may know less than anyone. The cure for "motherboards of a certain age" -- is to install 4 then 5 then 6. Mageia coders worked for weeks to overcome this, as I understand the blog and delays of 6's release.

Speaking as one of the people who worked on getting Mageia 6 ready for release, this is news to me!

I dont know about upcoming Mageia 7.

When the first beta release becomes available, please test it and report any problems. Open a bug report - I'm likely to be too busy fixing bugs to read the forum then.

I left out discussing other install methods I tried, because Mageia 6 Live media worked best, standard Mageia DVD media (on USB) didn't proceed through install as well as the Live media. I used both: Boot then Install, and also with Install directly. Outcomes for both were the same. I tried to use gparted for example to take the boot tag off and then add it back in, hoping that was the problem. But it did not work.

UEFI boot doesn't (normally) pay any attention to the partition bootable tag. The BIOS should store information in the motherboard non-volatile memory to tell it where to find EFI boot images. If you run the 'efibootmgr' command (as root user), you can see what has been stored. But there are lots of buggy and non-standard BIOSs out there that don't work quite as they should.